WHAT'S IN AN AGE

Collecting the morning sun

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Last week, while being put through some preliminary test at the eye doctor’s, the technician asked me my age and I completely forgot how old I am. I said “47? 46? I think I am 46.” That was my final answer. I went on with the rest of my appointment, reading tiny letters and answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to better or worse, lens 1 or lens 2. My left eye has been irritated and goopy off and on for about year. I chalked it up to allergies and sinus drainage. Turns out it wasn’t allergies, but a scratched cornea. I got my prescription for a steroid eye drop and went home. Then I asked Michael how old I was.

Y’all…I’m 44.

I have a pin number for my bank card, a different pin number I have to remember to use my library card, yet another pin number I have to use when I log time for teaching a yoga class. I have to remember many different combinations of numbers in order to navigate every day life. I obviously have not made it a priority to commit to memory the number of years I have been living on this planet. I am some number of years of age. Apparently that some is at times older than reality. So be it. My friend Sarah suggested that I just start telling people I’m 60 and see if I get offered discounts and compliments. I am seriously considering this strategy. Sixty is a nice round easy number to remember and I have to tell you that the more time I spend as a home owner, the more appealing those retirement communities look. I would move in one today if they’d let me.

Do you remember when you were so proud of the number of years you have been on the planet that you not only kept track of the year, but the months as well? You would happily chirp “I’m nine and three months!” or defiantly declare “I’m sixteen and a half!” as if the half really mattered. Those were the years when you thought that the number really truly mattered. At some point the importance of that number shifts. You start clinging to the years you thought were important because you realize you are creeping into a category of years where you will be invisible. Our attention spans are short. We place a lot of value and advertising space for the really young or the really old. We only want to read the first and last chapters. Those middle chapters are just filler. I am in those middle chapters. The advertisements that show up in my inbox are either geared for a woman ten years younger than I am or ten years older. I will admit that recently, more and more of those ads are geared for an older woman.

So you can see that it would be easy for me to think of myself as older.

The thing about the invisible years is that you get to be all of the ages and no one cares. Some times I’m ten years old, giddily tossing fireworks into a cart. I’ve been known to randomly do a cartwheel for no other reason than to make sure that I can still do a cartwheel. Then there are times I’m eighty and it takes me a second to stand up straight after sitting for a certain amount of time. I’m up at five in the morning, ready to start my day. Age is just a unit of time and time is relative. Is this just some philosophy I made up to make myself feel better about aging? Of course it is. But at the same time, I don’t know why I should feel bad about aging. I don’t feel the need to cling to my youth. A commercial just came on asking the question “Who has time for wrinkles?” I counter that with “who wants to waste time thinking about wrinkles?” I’ve got cartwheels to do and fireworks to set off. I’ve got a mug of coffee to drink while bird watching in my back yard.

These are the things that make me forget my actual age. At least this is what I tell myself to keep me from worrying that it is really dementia making me forget.

THE KIND OF OLD LADY I PLAN ON BEING ONE DAY

Eloise-ish

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The weather app on my phone told me that the low was forty, but the high for the day would be in the sixties. I could do forty, I thought even as I heard the furnace kick on for the house. I zipped up my sleeping bag coat, added a layer of gloves under my mittens and backed the Vespa out of the garage. Turns out that the extra layer of gloves did not keep my finger tips from freezing and I could not feel the tops of my thighs by the time I reached the parking garage. Forty degrees is colder than I had anticipated, but I only had to travel four miles in it. Four miles is a blink of an eye when traveling at my usual speeds. Surprisingly, a blink of an eye is all the time I need to imagine myself at age eighty, zipping around cars and flying over speed bumps on my scooter.

I want to be doing exactly that as an old lady.

When I think about the old lady I want to be one day, I always think of Tao Porchon-Lynch, the 101 year old yoga teacher. I went to look her up for this entry and discovered that she passed away in February. I’ve read her autobiography, but as I read through the obituary on her website, I was once again floored by this woman’s extraordinary life. I am inspired by her optimistic view and her inner joyful light that shown through her eyes and smile. A pinch of sadness hit me when I heard of her passing. I suppose I thought she would just go on teaching yoga and shimmering with joy for ever and ever. Except I guess maybe she decided that she had done enough shimmering and it was time to move on from this world.

Some time ago, I wrote a little story here about an eighty year old master surfer and maker of surf boards. I gave her the name of Ida Merryweather and last we left her, she was convincing her apprentice to help her sneak her friends out of the nursing home to go surfing. She was partly inspired by Tao, but also an imagination of the woman I would like to be at age eighty. I want to start the day by hearing my old joints pop and crackle as I get out of bed and stretch, gulp down some vitamin C and scramble up an egg for breakfast. Then I want to pack up whatever little terrier I have at the time (probably named Josephine because of genetics and how my Pepaw had at least three Penny’s before he died) and head out on the scooter. No plans. There might be stops for coffee or stops for photo taking. Me and the pup will take a picnic break in a park and go for a walk. I’ll do yoga and feed birds. Maybe I’ll start knitting again. I will collect a group of senior citizen friends and we will go once a week to play bingo and once a year on a big adventurous trip like touring the pyramids or camping in Africa. We’ll take up surfing and swimming with sharks.

Know that the joy of living is right inside you - Tao Porchon-Lynch

I am in training for those days now with brisk morning scooter rides and honoring that instinct to stop and take the picture. I’m going to torture class to keep these bones strong for swimming with (an if need be, fighting off) sharks. I’m eating greens and tofu because it’s good for me (also because I like it), but on occasion, I’m having ice-cream for dinner because that’s good for me too. I dance in the grocery store when a good beat is playing through the store speakers. Sometimes I sing along to those tunes. I do this because I really really believe that the knowledge of my very own inner pool of joy, is what’s going to allow me to be that spry, yoga practicing, scooter riding, bingo hopper, globe trotting, shark swimming eighty year old woman I plan on being one day.

30 SOMETHING

Someone trashed their 30s

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I did an illegal u-turn so I could take that picture of the trashed balloons. At the time, I found it funny to see someone trashing their thirties. My thirties were great! This was my first thought, but then I remembered my real thirties versus my imaginary thirties. My thirties were a complete shit show. I entered my thirties with a broken family wrecked by loss. When Chris and I celebrated the end of 2005, we celebrated with a real hope that the new year would be better. Then Chris’s Dad’s cancer came back and we entered the years of slogging our way through bogs of grief, depression and despair to find some glimmer of joy.

You know those round water bumper boats with the smelly gas engines. I used to beg to ride those as a kid and every time Dad would relent the money for a ticket, I would end up stuck in a corner going nowhere, just spinning. This describes my early thirties. There was grief on top of grief, living with a mother-in-law who I was constantly struggle to connect with, trying to dig out of debt and just stuck. Spinning in the corner. Next, I would move into a job where I killed mice every day for science. I’d often end my work day crying in a bathroom stall over all the carnage and how science wasn’t fun any more. Then I would watch my best friend deteriorate and die, only to have to repeat that process with my Dad. The rest of my thirties would be spent just trying to figure out how to live my life without that best friend and finding some sense of self. By the time I entered my forties, I felt like a wise old sage. Though, now that I’m in my mid-forties, I feel less wise and more old. Despite the train wreck of my thirties, I wouldn’t throw those years away. In those years, I would acquire the confidence in myself that I never had in my twenties. I don’t mean just a physical confidence, but a mental confidence, a belief in myself. I found that I was really good at teaching yoga and that I loved teaching. Those years brought me my scooter, which has been a constant source of glee. I grew my own vegetables and I made pickles and sauerkraut. I found my writing voice and discovered a creativity that had been locked deep inside me. I started taking my photography more seriously. Chris and I finally did what we always said we were going to do and that was to move out of Oklahoma. I moved into a job that made science fun again and did not leave me crying in the bathroom at the end of a work day. I learned some valuable life lessons in my thirties. Sure, they happened to be punch-in-a-gut hard lessons, but sometimes a lesson has to be difficult in order to really learn it. If it hadn’t been for the shit show that was my thirties, I would not be the woman I am today.

Of course that can be said of any decade. If I could say anything to the birthday celebrant who put those balloons out for trash pickup, it would be to savor and pay attention to every moment. Not just the moments in your thirties. All of the moments. Swim around in the painful moments until your fingers are wrinkly. Really soak those in because those moments make the good moments so so so so good. It’s like the painful moments rip a layer of skin off and the good moments are skin graphs that grow in that space. You might be under the impression that turning thirty will suddenly make you a grownup. That is not true. You will make grownup decisions, probably more of them than you did in the previous ten years of your life, but you will not be a grownup. There is no defining age for being a grownup. This is important because the less you dwell on the concept of being a grownup, the better off you are. I mean, be a grownup when it is absolutely necessary, but all other times allow yourself moments of silliness and play. Have ice cream for dinner. If your gut is telling you to pull the car over to explore some derelict building that looks interesting, do it. There’s a 60% chance of rain forecasted for the day? Ride the scooter anyway; there is a 40% chance it won’t.

And vote. Always vote.

43

43

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Michael walked into the kitchen Sunday morning as I was washing dishes and asked “So…do you feel thirty three, forty three, or fifty three?” I paused and thought about this for a minute before replying “Well…I don’t know what fifty three is supposed to feel like and since forty three is still pretty new, I don’t really know what that’s supposed to feel like either. So, I guess I feel thirty three.” The numbers are arbitrary really. Having never before experiencing this age, I can’t tell you if I feel older or younger. Maybe I feel younger, but wiser. Michael also mentioned how he liked the salt and pepper thing that is happening with my hair. I will say, that in the last two or three months, I’ve noticed that there’s a bit more salt in my hair. I don’t mind this either. When Michael asked the Cabbage if forty three was old, she of course said ‘yes’ because she’s eight and when you’re eight, forty three is a BIG number.

We spent my birthday weekend working on a puzzle and cursing the outside temperatures. Michael made me a strawberry cake that very much resembled Devil’s Tower but with sprinkles. We went to see the Cabbage’s band from School of Rock perform. Michael had my olive branch ring fixed so that I can wear it on my right ring finger. He also gave me a gift card to Anthropologie which I used to buy a dress that reminds me of my youth. In fact, if I still owned a pair of combat boots, I would own an outfit almost identical to one I wore in 1992. Michael and I ate a fancy dinner at the Pressed Penny Tavern amongst a crowd of people wearing Chiefs colors and yelling at one of the six TVs positioned on the wall. Reservations had been made for this dinner way before we knew the Chiefs would be heading to the NFC Champion playoffs game. We spent the rest of the evening at home, watching the rest of that game, with all of the animals piled on me and a fancy tea cup of gin and tonic in my hand. The weather kept me from witnessing and photographing the lunar eclipse and the Chiefs lost the playoffs. Win some, lose some.

Mostly win some.

I think many people would now put me in the category of ‘middle aged’. I have been receiving newsletter style emails lately for things related to women over fifty, things like skin care routines and exercises. I’ve been slightly obsessed with stories of women ninety and older who do things like teach yoga and run marathons. I have a very clear image of myself in my old age. I expect at age ninety that I will be living some where warm and riding my scooter around to run my daily errands. Those errands will include morning yoga classes on the beach, followed up with catching some sweet waves on my sweet surf board. After rinsing the salt and sand from leathery old lady skin, I will strap my yoga mat and surfboard to the scooter and head to the market where I will purchase fresh veggies and fish for my lunch. I’ll spend the rest of my day puttering around my cottage, maybe working a garden. Maybe I’ll learn how to use a loom or maybe I’ll just read trashy romance novels while swinging in a hammock.

I’ll be ninety. I’ll do what I want.

BECAUSE OF YOUR AGE

Piosonberry

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I have a doctor's appointment coming up in a couple of weeks to see how things are going with my cholesterol medicine. To prepare, I had to have some blood drawn for my visit and while I was in the lab, the technician handed me a cup and said "your doctor has also requested a urine sample." I let me lip frown to one side when the technician said this. I had not prepared for a urine test (not because of drugs). I had prepared for the blood draw by doing a twelve hour fast. I only had a little bit of water that morning to wash down my vitamins. I looked at that cup and thought I would be lucky if I could give them a teaspoon. Also, I looked at the cup and the three vials of blood they took from my arm and got a little nervous about all of this testing business. When I voiced this nervousness to Michael, he said "It's probably just because of your age." which made me kind of want to shove him down a flight of stairs.

I say 'kind of' only because I do not have the energy to care for his invalid ass. 

I am not an old person! Forty one is not old! Maybe it's a little bit old. I have noticed that there's an increase in the white hairs on my head. There's a grouping of white that is starting to form a streak through my bangs, but I think it is pretty cool. It's like having highlights without going through the process of getting highlights. But we all know that graying hair is not indicative of age. Sure there are days when I feel like an old woman. I look at the things that have happened to me in my life and it seems like all of it should not fit into forty one years of life. This makes me feel older than my actual years and disappointed that I am not really all that wiser. Then there are the days when I crawl out of bed to the tune of my cracking joints and I have to gimp my way to the bathroom and think "Jesus! Have I been abducted by aliens and returned to earth as a hundred year old woman?" Then I look out the bathroom window toward the skies and beg them to come back and get me and return me back to my supple youthful body. 

As if I have ever had a supple body.

I'm still very much young. I speed to work every day on my scooter. Last week I performed a perfect cartwheel with out incident. In fact, just the other day, I had a total childish impulse to steal something from Target. Our Target could use a little feng shui help in the area of their front doors. When you walk in the doors, the shopping carts are immediately to your left. Four steps across from the carts is that area where they have all those dollar items of kid things and crafts. Immediately to the left of the shopping carts are the exit doors. See...it seems like I've already cased the joint. To replace your shopping cart correctly back in any kind of order out of the way, you have to walk back through the dollar section. On Saturday, I paid for my items in the self check-out line and then pushed my cart towards the door. I paused and looked around at the already scattered carts and decided that I was going to return my shopping cart to its proper place in the cart corral. Then, as I passed a rack of various dollar craft items, I had the most sudden, intense urge to just grab something and stick in my shopping bag. I thought, very matter of factly, "I'm going to steal something." 

I did NOT steal anything, but the urge to do so was so shockingly intense. It was the most compulsive urge that I still can't believe I walked out of there without slipping something into my shopping bag. Something is cracked in my brain or maybe I'm just in a place right where I'm all "fuck it!" I just don't care. Crap...I just realized that's not a youthful feeling. Teenagers care about everything. I don't really care about anything. Well, that's not really true. I care about what I can do in my neighborhood to fight racism; I'm calling my local community center to see about teaching a yoga class there. I care about the environment and equal rights. I care about the masses of uneducated, misinformed Americans because their ignorance led to the election of Donald Fucking Trump as our president. But apparently I don't care if I get caught stealing a dollar item from Target. At least, that is what my brain was telling me on Saturday.

Maybe it is because of my age. Because of my age, I care very little about what others think of me. Because of my age, I have a little bit more wisdom. Because of my age, I'm becoming a klepto. 

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT

I'm staring at my reflection in the mirror. After weeks of an adolescent breakout on my chin, my skin has finally started to clear up. I'm thinking that I'm having a pretty good skin day actually and then I see it. The white hair in my left eyebrow. It's not the first white hair to recently grace my eyebrows. The first one showed up on the right, a short brilliant white hair. When that one showed up, I had this internal struggle of whether or not to pluck that hair. Plucking  it seemed hypocritical since I am so adamant about not dying the gray from hair, but at the same time that one white hair just seemed so out of place. I left it of course, like a short shiny beacon. The thing that set this new white hair apart from the others was it's length. This eyebrow hair was longer than any of the hairs growing on top of my head. It was long enough to put into a hair clip. 

First of all, how does that even happen? How can I look at my face every damn day and not notice this giant hair growing out of it? Did it happen overnight? I mean, that's really a lot of length for a hair to grow overnight. What else is on my face that I'm not seeing? We had a college professor in undergrad who had three large hairs growing out of the top his nose. I remembered that professor as I now started to scrutinize the top of my nose. Just to be sure. My body is not really sure how to behave these days. The acne on my chin says "teenager!" while the pain in my wrist screams "geriatric!" and my body hair has decided to do what the fuck ever. 

A couple of weeks ago I was wearing my David Bowie t-shirt and going through the check-out line in our cafeteria. The woman ringing people up and who practically runs the show down there looked at my t-shirt and said "You are not old enough to know who David Bowie is." I assured her that I was quite old enough to know The Goblin King as well as Ziggy Stardust. At a party on Saturday, there was a young man who nearly dropped his full plate of food on the floor as he leaned forward with a shocked "what?!" when he was told that I was nearly forty. I am well aware that I do not look (nor act) my age. Apparently this young man did not notice the foot long white hair growing out of my brow either (or it wasn't there yet).

I found myself having to tell my story to a couple of people that evening. It was a party in Terry's backyard, but more than half the people were people I had never met before. It's still hard to explain how I got here without mentioning Chris, because I wouldn't be here with out Chris. It's hard to explain how I've compacted eighty years of living into almost forty years of life. This is the only time I ever feel older than thirty nine. That and when everyone keeps posting first day of school pictures of their babies' first day of school. Tiny babies in high school. What is this world coming to? Then on Sunday, we took a wrong turn into a retirement community and I thought "ooh! look at this lovely retirement community!" So really I am an eighty year old woman trapped in a body that looks younger than forty, rides a Vespa and still wears Star Wars T-shirts with R2D2 on them. 

In the end, I did not pluck that crazy long white hair either. I trimmed it with a pair of scissors.  

AT WAR WITH MY OVARIES

Oh good lord this face

elephant_soap's photo on Instagram

Remember when I said that everyone was pregnant? Well, we've reached the point were those babies are actually being born. Charlotte came months ago and she's this lovely drooly round squishy goodness of a baby. She makes the most wonderful faces and she's going to be so mad at us when she turns into a teenager for some of those faces we captured on (digital) film. Too bad Charlotte. You've been born into a framily of jokers and hilarity and dang if you don't make the perfect faces for meming. You can thank us all now for helping you develop the greatest sense of humor. After Charlotte, one of my coworkers had her baby. We had a month to ooh and awe over the picture she emailed to everyone before it was finally Jeff and his wife's turn. I was standing in line at IKEA Saturday when Jeff sent me a text with a picture of their newest member of the family, a perfect little girl born at 11:03 that morning. I promptly burst into tears.

And then my ovaries and my brain had the big baby debate. My ovaries would say that women my age have babies all the time. It's true. The CDC has a report on pregnancy rates for 2009 showing a decrease in pregnancies for woman under thirty while pregnancies increased significantly for women thirty and over. All the report is saying is that women are waiting until later in life to have kids. This isn't news. Women and their partners are just making a decision to wait a little bit on the whole kid thing until the woman is established comfortably in her career and they are financially stable enough to support another human being. Except my brain knows that even though pregnancies are up for this age group, fertility is down. The ideal age for pregnancy is really in the late teens, early twenties. Your eggs have the least possible genetic mutations and chromosome realign correctly during cell division. Your body can carry and deliver a baby easier at this age too. Your joints are more elastic for expanding and you have a faster recovery time. Except most women I know usually don't hear their biological clock ticking until they're at least thirty. Our bodies are a Catch 22. 

My ovaries can at times violently tell my brain that yes we can totally do this at our age. "At our age". (Like I'm really all that old. I am not old in the grand scheme of life.) Those ovaries will say "Hey! you eat your leafy greens and do yoga. Your body can totally do this without blinking an eye." Thank God my brain is so much smarter than this because my brain knows that my body has to make it through more than the act of carrying a baby inside me and delivering that baby. This body then has to care for that baby. There's five years or more of picking up, carting around, opening doors with feet, being used as a personal jungle gym, being used as a personal trampoline, chasing after (which requires running) and you get the idea. Maybe the load gets a little lighter after the five years, but then comes the carpool lanes and the running to soccer games and the rushing to scouts and the trotting to dance classes. Things might slow down once the kid is driving, but that only brings along the damage of stress caused by worrying about that kid driving and being where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there.

So yeah, my ovaries may kick me heard enough to make me cry at times, but my brain is wise enough to brush those tears away and move forward in that check out line.